Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Anniversary Of Truth-Telling Or Propaganda

By Levi Obijiofor

This past weekend
has been one of celebrations – celebrations of a government that promised so
much but found reasons to explain why it failed to provide for the basic needs
of citizens, celebrations of a government that promised to transform our
economy, to destroy corruption, to dismantle the Boko Haram insurgency in the
North, suppress other ethnic uprisings, create a stable society by enhancing
law and order across the country, and to tackle socioeconomic consequences of
rising youth unemployment. By the end of the celebrations, Nigerians remain
divided on whether the government of Muhammadu Buhari has significantly reduced
poverty in the country or whether it has heaped more pain on ordinary citizens.

President Buhari and Information Minister, Lai Mohammed

This disagreement is not surprising. Before the politicians were elected into
office, there was so much hype and mystique built around Buhari, who was
presented as the man who would redeem the country and emancipate everyone from
16 years of hardship created by the endemic corruption that manifested in the
government of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Here is propaganda number
one.

At a book presentation in Abuja on
Thursday, 18 February, 2016, President Muhammadu Buhari claimed that Nigeria “has the fastest growing economy in Africa and one of the fastest in the world.” It is
intriguing to see that three months later, after Buhari’s statement was
publicised across the world, a senior minister in Buhari’s government admitted
publicly that the bad shape of the nation’s economy should not be used as
justifiable ground to explain the failure to provide for the needs of the
citizens. If that was the case, why did the president and his ministers and
special assistants spread the propaganda that Nigeria
had the fastest growing economy in Africa and
one of the most rapidly growing economies in the world. So far, it
seems some government officials and some leaders of the All Progressives
Congress (APC) have been feeding citizens with a diet of misinformation
concerning the state of the economy.

On Thursday, 26 May, 2016, Information Minister, Lai Mohammed, reviewed
the Federal Government’s performance in the past 12 months and admitted humbly
that the current economic challenges, confronting the nation should not be used
as the underlying basis to rationalise the government’s failure to implement
all those promises made to people during the dizzying months leading up to
national elections in 2015. Such admission was unexpected, unimaginable, and
difficult to absorb. Anyone who knows Lai Mohammed would also
remember the kind of propaganda messages he engineered and pumped into the
public domain to polish Buhari’s image during the election campaign. He never
admitted that the APC had flaws. He was always ready to deflect criticisms
directed at the principal officers of the APC. For such a man to dismount from
his high horse and to acknowledge the reality of the impoverished conditions
that citizens are going through signifies a change in the mindset of leaders of
the APC. Even as Lai Mohammed admitted to some lapses on the part
of the government, he still regaled the nation with three achievements the
government of Buhari had recorded in the past one year.

The three areas
were insecurity, anti-corruption campaign and the economy. Let us start with
insecurity. While the government’s campaign against Boko Haram might be
yielding some good results, Boko Haram continues to strike with ease at any
public place it chooses. While it may be true that Boko Haram no longer holds
any Nigerian territorial space, while it may be true that esprit de corps and
professionalism among soldiers, fighting Boko Haram may have risen to an all
time high, it still remains to be seen how quickly soldiers would dislodge the
remnants of the terrorist organisation. Surely, the government has
made some progress in the fight against Boko Haram but that abbreviated success
should not be embellished to imply that Boko Haram has been routed from their
camps.

Boko Haram has changed
its modus operandi and now uses teenage girls, as suicide bombers. Time will
tell whether the government has overstated its success in the war against Boko
Haram. Still, in some parts of the North, the fear of Boko Haram is
widespread. The direct victims of the war, who were displaced from their
communities cannot return to restart their lives. As long as these people
continue to live like refugees in their fatherland because security remains an
issue, the government cannot really claim it is winning the war against Boko
Haram.

These displaced
people need to be resettled as quickly as possible so they can regain their
lives. Even if the government is no longer bogged down in the fight
against Boko Haram, a radical group in the Niger Delta has opened another
deadly front in the region. The Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) announced its
emergence the other day and issued threats and intimidated government officials.

It said it would
not shift or bend until it has achieved its core objectives in the region. Since
the emergence of the NDA, the members have followed up their threats by blowing
up oil pipelines and installations. They have disrupted the flow and supply of
petroleum products to marketers and, therefore, reduced by a significant margin
the amount of revenue the government can earn through the sale of petroleum
products. Buhari might be a renowned and dreaded soldier in his
days in the military but Nigeria
has changed so significantly from the Nigeria that Buhari ruled in the
early part of the 1980s.

So, unlike the
1980s, anywhere Buhari turns to today, he will be confronted with pockets of
militant groups that did not exist when he was military head of state. These
groups have whinged and tabled all manner of grievances against the government
and the Nigerian state. This is not helped by the government’s bellicose
attitude to the militant groups, and the use of the language of
intolerance designed to frighten the militants but which has had the opposite
effect. An elected president should show his unique quality as a
compassionate, understanding and listening man, who is willing to consider all
requests to enable him to make informed decisions that may or may not appeal to
the rebel groups.

A listening
president should draw the various groups together, have a chat with them to
understand the basis of their anger and what they expect the president to do to
pacify them. A president cannot just ignore court orders, like the case of
Nnamdi Kanu, UK-based chief campaigner for the rights of the Indigenous People
of Biafra (IPOB), who has been incarcerated because he expressed views that
have been deemed to be at odds with the goals of a united Nigeria.

Buhari’s attitude
and response to the emerging ethnic activists has been to tell them to go jump
into the lagoon. That is not diplomacy. Unfortunately, Buhari likes to use
military language of coercion that might have worked when he was military head
of state. Today the world and indeed Nigeria have changed and will
continue to change in response to global events and developments.
Beyond the fight against Boko Haram, Lai Mohammed should tell the nation the
government’s strategy and timeline for ending the callous massacre of innocent
lives of villagers by marauding herdsmen, who invade villages in the middle of
the night and slaughter people at sleep, as if they are animals.

The government’s
apathy to the death and disaster caused by rampaging herdsmen has led some
people to accuse the president of being biased in favour of his kith and kin.
This is harmful for national cohesion. Why would a president, who said in his
acceptance speech, following the presidential election outcome last year that
he would govern in the interest of all Nigerians suddenly abandon a pledge he
made to the nation in a public forum? On corruption, it is obvious
that right from the early days of Buhari’s presidency, the government was
accused of waging a selective war against members of the opposition, a war that
has so far targeted officials, who served in the government of Goodluck Jonathan.

Why, for example,
has Buhari not extended his anti-corruption campaign to include members of the
APC? Public opinion suggests there are within the APC people, who might be
involved in corrupt practices. To make the anti-corruption campaign fair to
everyone, the government’s searchlight must beam on all members of our society.
There should be no sacred cows or people deemed to be above the law. Equal
rights of citizens is one of the fundamental principles of
democracy. The government’s claims that it has steadied the economy
and recorded amazing results can only be taken as another hyperbole. Clear
evidence of how the economy has travelled should be seen in the fast
depreciating and capricious exchange rate of the naira. The unreliable exchange
rate shows how the naira has tumbled in value to other currencies. The sharp
decline in the price of oil, the nation’s major foreign exchange earner, has
had adverse impact on the economy.

When Buhari and the
APC made all the promises about their economic management skills, little did
they realise that the power did not belong to them but to the international
financial system that influences the performance of local economies. A
government, a president, and a political party that bragged about their magical
powers to change the economy could not provide for the basic needs of citizens
within one year. So, in all three areas that Lai Mohammed tried to exaggerate
the achievements of the government in which he serves, there are equally issues
that could be used to criticise the government. I was surprised that Lai
Mohammed chose areas that a majority of citizens have identified as symbols of
failure by the Buhari government.